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Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Technical Problem at BMO Investorline gives a Scare

I’ve been quite happy with my service from BMO Investorline, but yesterday morning when I logged in to my accounts, the cash balances all showed zero. The possible explanations ranged from mostly harmless to scary thoughts of identity theft.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get through to Investorline on the phone until a couple of hours later. Eventually I spoke to a pleasant guy who assured me that it was just some technical glitch. He was able to read the correct cash balances to me.

This would have been less disruptive to my day if the system was able to detect that the cash balances made no sense and presented some sort of error message rather than just showing zeros. I still have no idea of how widespread the problem was.

This brings me to another minor annoyance with Investorline: stale account information. The information presented to me online is from the previous day. There are times when the information seems to be more stale than just one day. Most of the time this delay is harmless, but every so often I want to know if a transaction took place and waiting a full day or more is inconvenient.

Overall I’ve been pleased by Investorline over the years, but I’d like my account access to be more stable and more timely.